Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 supply chain provenance data, and then con- tact our customer to say, "There is something wrong with this machine." One scenario might be to initiate a recall. It's very applicable in other industries, such as automotive, where they have a similar infrastructure. Johnson: This sounds like there's some poten- tial to include machine data from the manufac- turing process. For example, was this particu- lar machine in or out of spec? There are plenty of situations where manufacturing tolerances can cascade, and a manufacturing process was within the process window on the edge. And that's fine unless you run into some other later processing step that pushes the whole subas- sembly out of spec. Could that sort of detail also be tracked along with the overall history of the product? Lam: That's one potential use for a blockchain, as Christophe mentioned earlier. You put all the information on the ledger in terms of the transaction, but you could always have off- chain information, like the parametric data during manufacturing. Johnson: It allows you to trace back and find the root causes of field failures and recalls. That could cause the manufacturing supply chain to recognize the need to modify process windows to maintain specifications at all times. Is there some ongoing optimization that can happen here as well? Begue: Exactly. And one thing I wanted to men- tion earlier that may be emerging is that we are seeing several clients in electronics have a large part of their bill of material (BOM) made of embedded software that is delivered with the hardware. For example, think about a communication system of some kind, such as a base station. There is a lot of software on the hardware of the base station. Some of it is open-source, and others are proprietary soft- ware, but there's a lot of entitlement that needs to be managed. In many cases, the configura- tion for that complex system is somewhat spe- cific or may be specific to that order. limit the payment of the entire invoice. Now, when the client calls on a service to be pro- vided by IBM, we can write that request onto the blockchain and deliver that service with a reference to that request. This creates an undisputed record of a request, and that is the basis for self-billing; the client bills itself for the service and the level of disputes is dramatically reduced. We get paid much earlier, and the client doesn't waste its time disputing invoices. It makes for better customer service. Johnson: What about reverse supply chain issues? One of the challenges for electronics manufacturing is when there is a manufactur- ing issue that takes some time before it's iden- tified, and manufacturing could have been run- ning in a bad state for quite some time before they find out. One common example of this is field failures. How does blockchain help with traceability in that case? Lam: Telemetry data would be useful in this case. Depending on our customer's choice, telemetry data might be available to us to understand machine health out in the field. It doesn't collect any data, like client-related information, but it's more about the machine. How is it being operated? What is the heart- beat of that system? A potential use case will be to apply block- chain to capture the space between the telem- etry collection point and the forward-supply chain portion. If anything goes wrong, we can easily tap into that, along with the forward Depending on our customer's choice, telemetry data might be available to us to understand machine health out in the field.